Paragraph Quotes

• Having imagination, it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that, if you were unimaginative, would take you only a minute. Or you might not write the paragraph at all.

  Franklin P. Adams

  Writing, Imagination, Might

  Franklin P. Adams (1944). “Nods and Becks”

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• At one time I thought the most important thing was talent. I think now that the young man must possess or teach himself, training himself, in infinite patience, which is to try and to try until it comes right. He must train himself in ruthless intolerance-that is to throw away anything that is false no matter how much he might love that page or that paragraph. The most important thing is insight, that is to be-curiosity-to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does, and if you have that, then I don't think the talent makes much difference, whether you've got it or not.

  William Faulkner

  Writing, Thinking, Men

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• A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.

  William Strunk, Jr.

  Writing, Should Have, Drawing

  The Elements of Style ch. 2 (1918)

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• The camera can photograph thought. It's better than a paragraph of sweet polemic.

  Dirk Bogarde

  Photography, Sweet, Art

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• The problem is once you've written the opening paragraph and worked out how the rest of the story will go in your head, there's nothing in it for you. I write in longhand using disposable fountain pens on the right-hand side of the notebook for the first draft, then I rewrite some of the sentences and paragraphs on the left-hand side.

  Colm Toibin

  Notebook, Writing, Hands

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• Anybody can have ideas-the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.

  Mark Twain

  Writing, Plain Language, Ideas

  Mark Twain (1990). “Mark Twain's Letters, Volume 2: 1867-1868”, p.183, Univ of California Press

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• I wasted a lot of years working on my writing and very grandly saying, 'And now... My Novel!,' which would soon be reduced to a short story, then to a paragraph.

  George Saunders

  Writing, Years, Stories

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• If you set your bar at 'amazing' it's awfully difficult to start. Your first paragraph, sketch, formula, sample or concept isn't going to be amazing. Your tenth one might not be either. Confronted with the gap between your vision of perfect and the reality of what you've created, the easiest path is no path. Shrug. Admit defeat. Hit delete. One more reason to follow someone else and wait for instructions. Of course, the only path to amazing runs directly through not-yet-amazing. But not-yet-amazing is a great place to start, because that's where you are.

  Seth Godin

  Running, Reality, Perfect

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• The last paragraph in which you tell what the story is about is almost always best left out.

  Irwin Shaw

  Stories, Literature, Lasts

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• It has always been my practice to cast a long paragraph in a single mould, to try it by my ear, to deposit it in my memory, but to suspend the action of the pen till I had given the last polish to my work.

  Edward Gibbon

  Memories, Writing, Practice

  Edward Gibbon, John Holroyd Earl of Sheffield (1837). “The Miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon, Esq: With Memoirs of His Life and Writings”, p.97

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• I write every paragraph four times - once to get my meaning down, once to put in anything I have left out, once to take out anything that seems unnecessary, and once to make the whole thing sound as if I had only just thought of it.

  Margery Allingham

  Writing, Sound, Four

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• One of the most difficult things is the first paragraph. I have spent many months on a first paragraph, and once I get it, the rest just comes out very easily.

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez

  Months, Firsts, Difficult

  FaceBook post by Gabriel García Márquez from Mar 09, 2015

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• In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn't cope with, and that terrible listlessness that starts to set in about 2:55, when you know you've taken all the baths that you can usefully take that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the newspaper you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o'clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul.

  Douglas Adams

  Moving, Sunday, Dark

  "Life, the Universe and Everything" by Douglas Adams, (Ch. 1), 1982.

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• The first sentence of the truth is always the hardest. Each of us had a first sentence, and most of us found the strength to say it out loud to someone who deserved to hear it. What we hoped, and what we found, was that the second sentence of the truth is always easier than the first, and the third sentence is even easier than that. Suddenly you are speaking the truth in paragraphs, in pages. The fear, the nervousness, is still there, but it is joined by a new confidence. All along, you've used the first sentence as a lock. But now you find that it's the key.

  David Levithan

  Keys, Locks, Pages

  David Levithan (2014). “Two Boys Kissing”, p.34, Egmont UK

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• Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Being Positive, Negative, Use

  Ernest Hemingway, Matthew Joseph Bruccoli (1970). “Ernest Hemingway, cub reporter: Kansas City Star stories”

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• If you rewrite a paragraph fifty times and forty-nine of them are terrible, that's fine; you only need to get it right once.

  Tana French

  Needs, Fifty, Nine

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• Writing your name can lead to writing sentences. And the next thing you'll be doing is writing paragraphs, and then books. And then you'll be in as much trouble as I am!

  Henry David Thoreau

  Book, Writing, Names

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• The more fiction you read and write, the more you'll find your paragraphs forming on their own.

  Stephen King

  Writing, Fiction

  Stephen King (2002). “On Writing”, p.125, Simon and Schuster

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• It's difficult for me to feel that a solid page without the breakups of paragraphs can be interesting. I break mine up perhaps sooner than I should in terms of the usage of the English language.

  A. E. van Vogt

  Break Up, Breakup, Interesting

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• Everyone my age had written a novel and I was still having difficulty writing a paragraph.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Writing, Age, Difficulty

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• How many a dispute could have been deflated into a single paragraph if the disputants had dared to define their terms

  Aristotle

  Argument, Disputes, Term

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• Keep your paragraphs short. Writing is visual - it catches the eye before it has a chance to catch the brain.

  William Zinsser

  Writing, Eye, Brain

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• I have hundreds of Word documents filled with pages of one-liners. If I begin to write a story, or if one of my thoughts leads to more than a couple paragraphs of writing, I'll go into these documents and pull out lines that I think would work with it.

  Chelsea Martin

  Couple, Writing, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Write every day even if it is just a paragraph.

  Michael Connelly

  Writing, Ifs

  "Michael Connelly’s Biography/ FAQs". www.michaelconnelly.com.

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• I'm not trying to create an aesthetic that's my own; I'm trying to create a way understanding things through drawing and painting. That's the common thread. Things can look different, but that's not what's important. What's important is the process is the same, the ideas are the same, I'm using the same building blocks, but they're different. The larger framework is the same; it's the pieces that change. For me, it's about these different elements, but you're still fitting them together into sentences, words, paragraphs, and stories.

  Kysa Johnson

  Block, Understanding, Important

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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